Better Than Most : Teacher Beliefs about Effort and Ability in Uganda
Do teachers have accurate beliefs about their effort and ability? This paper explores this through a survey experiment in public-private partnership schools in Uganda, wherein teacher self-beliefs are contrasted with their beliefs about other teach...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/479301526303113939/Better-than-most-teacher-beliefs-about-effort-and-ability-in-Uganda http://hdl.handle.net/10986/29846 |
| Summary: | Do teachers have accurate beliefs about
their effort and ability? This paper explores this through a
survey experiment in public-private partnership schools in
Uganda, wherein teacher self-beliefs are contrasted with
their beliefs about other teachers in the same school. The
study finds that, on average, teachers tend to rate ability,
effort, and job satisfaction more positively for themselves
than for other teachers. This tendency is called high
relative self-regard. The study finds no systematic evidence
of high relative self-regard around perceptions of student
engagement quality and available support structures. More
experienced teachers are less likely to exhibit high
relative self-regard, while teachers showing low effort are
more likely to exhibit it. This is analogous to the
Dunning-Kruger effect in psychology, except respondents rate
themselves as better than most (not better than average) and
variation is explored over effort (not cognitive ability).
High relative self-regard is less pronounced in
owner-managed public-private partnership schools, suggesting
that when principle-agent problems are less severe, schools
find ways to correct for inaccurate teacher self-beliefs.
These results provide suggestive evidence of cognitive
biases that help teachers rationalize suboptimal effort in
the classroom. This in turn points to the importance of
providing objective feedback to teachers about their effort
and performance as one potential way to improve their
performance. Teacher self-beliefs are important areas of
intervention because they are likely to affect how teachers
optimize their effort and training investments. Self-beliefs
are also likely to affect how teachers respond to changes in
incentive and accountability regimes. |
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